Afterlife

Review

For those people who have ever wanted to play god, this may be your big chance. Afterlife makes you the Demiurge of a planet, with complete control over how your heaven and hell develop. For good measure, you can also influence events on the planet which sits between your heaven and hell.

Afterlife is a world-building simulation game. You start at year 0 with some money and your two advisers Jasper Wormwood and Aria Goodhalo. You need to build an efficient and effective heaven and hell. (Efficiency being a relative matter. Roads that are good for heaven aren't necessarily the best for hell.) There are some tutorials that you can watch, nicely separated into several bits of related content that will help teach you the basics of building heaven and hell. Of course, this is a simulation so there's a lot more that you'll need to discover.

The game also has a lot of complexity. Buildings in the afterlife can and must evolve. However to do so, they need the right conditions. There needs to be a balance for each fate structure. Temporary souls need things to do, permanent souls need more things to think about. Vibes close to the buildings must be good (heaven) or bad (hell). You need to tap into sufficient power sources to enable the buildings to change.

When starting Afterlife, you may choose to either begin an easy, medium or difficult game, or you may load one of four pre-built scenarios. The scenarios are developed games where you have to fix the problems left by the previous demiurge. You should wait until you've developed some degree of proficiency with the game before you load the scenarios.